“Simple. I merely said that tomorrow, precisely at noon, the United States of America will be destroyed.”
Sonya crossed to a cupboard, came back with pipes, gave one each to
Skinner and the Cossack. “We have heard rumors,” she said. “So many rumors. Yes, there is something new, something terrible. But we don’t know what. We have no idea—”
“You’ll not get it from me,” Beria said. “One way or the other, you will kill me, is it not so? So why should I talk?”
Tumanov grinned coldly. “Commissar Beria, I have heard of your refined tortures on Lubianka Street.” He shrugged. “They… have their value. But we Cossacks are more primitive. There is a sliver of burning wood under the fingernails, a beating on the soles of your feet, the slow application of heat to your eyes, a tearing of the ears, the leash of a wild pig attatched to your— But do I make myself clear? It is a question of how you would prefer to die.”
Tumanov went’ back to, sipping his tea noisily. Beria looked at him, paled. Smiling cheerfully, Tumanov got up, stretched, lit a fire on the stove. “I will talk,” Beria whispered. “What’s the difference? There isn’t a thing you can do anyway.”
Tumanov sighed his disappointment, but Skinner said the one word: “Talk.”
“You’re an American,” Beria said.
“You have read, the American news papers with their sporadic accounts of—what is it you call them?—flying saucers.”
*’Sure. Mass hysteria, probably.”
“Bah! You Americans make me laugh with your smugness. You can’t explain it and so you write it off as simply as that. Do you think we closed all our atomic factories because of mass hysteria? Do you also think that the American continent alone was visited by these… flying saucers? Do you?”
“Go on.” The man’s crazy, Skinner thought. And yet…
“One landed here, Mironov. East of the Ural Mountains. In it was a creature. Our science, yes, even the Soviet science, is as dust at its feet. Why not, Mironov? It is a vast universe. Far out in each direction, as far as our telescopes can see, horde after horde of galaxies, a hundred million stars in each. The creature gestures vaguely. It is from somewhere out there. We don’t know where. We don’t care!
“Earth, what is Earth? The prick of a pin on the carcass of an elephant. Less. A virus on the body of a bacterium on the leg of a flea. Do I make myself clear? The creature is from somewhere else, and it happens that its world is a million years further along the road of evolution than is our planet. Fission bombs, fusion bombs, nerve-gas, germ warfare—bah! What are these beside its science? The puny, stumbling, instinctive crying of a new-born babe! It has science, Mironov. Science….
“I have seen samples. I have—but no matter. It also has a cold hatred of evil, Mironov. Not emotional, that hatred goes beyond emotions. An intellectual hatred. We took it to Moscow, gave it over to the Cominform, the Foreign Office, my own M.V.D. We showed it the good life, the Russian life. We showed it motion pictures, read it speeches, fed it books. Then we demonstrated the evils of your decadent Western world.
“In short, the creature is indoctrinated. You are no fool, Mironov, and so I imagine you realize our tutelage was… shall we say a trifle biased? The creature believes—firmly, very firmly—that the West is bent on conquest, on enslavement, on destruction. Specifically, the United States. We have fed wood to the fire, have kindled the flames of its wrath.
“In short, Mironov, the creature which stepped out of a flying saucer in the Ural Mountains shall be on demonstration in Red Square tomorrow, shall stay there, unmoving, and shall, precisely at twelve o’clock noon, destroy the United States.”
THE FOLLOWING morning. Ten o’clock. Skinner imagined himself all the varieties of a gullible idiot rolled into one. A weird, impossible story, but they could not shake Berla away from it as much as one hair’s breadth. And so, cursing impotently, Skinner had left him with Sonya and Tumanov, had set out himself for Red Square.
Yes, Sonya had heard something about a mass meeting in Red Square, but wouldn’t they have to postpone it, with the show still falling? And true, there could be life elsewhere in the Universe. Surely everyone who’d seen a flying saucer in the past few years had not downed one drink too many.
Then, had Beria spoken truth? Skinner knew he’d be taking an unwise gamble if he concluded otherwise, still, what could he do? Inform the American Embassy, watch the courteous diplomats laugh him off politely? He doubted if they could get a message through, to Washington in time, anyway. Find the creature, if the creature existed, and let it know that the Cominform had fed it a bunch of lies? Sure, just like that—undoing in five minutes months’ of careful indoctrination!
Any way he turned, he found no solution. He might as well be batting his head against the Kremlin’s grim brick walls….
He received his first shock as he cut across Kerensky Street and into the Square which faced Lenin’s tomb. All about him, the snow came down, piling up in larger and larger drifts. But it wasn’t snowing in Red Square!
The ground: dry. The air: clear. A curtain of snow arid cold all around the Square, but not within it. And the huge expanse pulsed with a radiance more golden than sunlight, and more pleasant. Midsummer in Red Square, winter for the rest of Moscow.
Perhaps the Russians had made strides toward conquering the elements, perhaps they’d even travelled further in that direction than Western science. But as Skinner peeled off his overcoat and joined the noisy throngs in Red Square, he knew they could not have gone this far. The whole place smacked of an alien science, an alien world…
Laurenti Beria’s claims almost seemed modest!
On the balcony over Lenin’s tomb rested a platform—perhaps a hundred feet square and glossy black in color, an imposing slab of polished jet. From this the golden radiance seemed to emerge, leaping up in a million million tiny motes and creating a great canopy over all of Red Square.
ATOP THE platform rested—something.
Flying saucer, flying disc, spaceship—what did the name matter? The first man who had seen one of these things, back in 1947, had not called it a saucer at all; he’d merely declared that it moved with a saucer-like motion, spinning, scaling, perhaps like a flat rock thrown out over water. But the name had stuck. Skinner knew, and he remembered the vain effort of the Air-Material Command to track down one of the will-o’-the-wisp spacecraft.
This thing, on the jet platform atop Lenin’s tomb almost looked like a saucer! A big golden platter, thirty feet across and certainly no more than six or seven feet thick, with a raised bubble of what looked like glass bulging out from its upper surface.
Around the bubble stood several figures, but from this distance Skinner could not see them clearly. He pushed through the crowd, elbowing the dull-eyed, jostling workers from his path. Closer…
He recognized Stalin first, a small thick-set man whose military uniform failed to hide a generous paunch, whose moustache seemed in life larger than it did in pictures. To the dictator’s left stood plump Molotov, his bald head shining under the golden light, his spectacles reflecting the radiance and hiding his eyes. To Stalin’s right—Vishinsky, white-haired, nervous, fidgety. Grouped around them were a trio of lesser dignitaries, one of them wearing the uniform of a Field Marshal.
The crowd roared hysterically when Stalin raised his hand. More roaring and Stalin smiled, but with the big back moustache protruding down over his upper lip it looked like a leer. Finally the crowd settled back in silence, and scores of Red soldiers in the Square relaxed their grips on bayoneted rifles.